Meet Charles Pecora: Oak Spring’s First Head Gardener

The following article was written by Marty Ross as part of a project to understand and publicly share the roles and influences of different figures who supported Mrs. Mellon throughout the history of the Oak Spring Garden.

In 1956, Charles Pecora packed up his family and moved from New York to Upperville, Virginia, to start a new job as head gardener at Oak Spring, the residence and surrounding garden at the heart of Paul and Bunny Mellon’s 4,000-acre estate in the gently rolling hills of Virginia’s horse country. Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon’s extraordinary garden called for an exceptional horticulturist: over the next 18 years, Pecora’s task was to help Mrs. Mellon, herself a crackerjack gardener and a remarkably sensitive designer, realize her dreams.

Mr. Pecora brought considerable professional experience to bear in his new position. He was a 1939 graduate of the New York Botanical Garden’s prestigious gardening school, founded by the legendary horticulturist T.H. Everett, who became a personal friend. At NYBG, Pecora started as an apprentice gardener, but, by the time he left, he had been promoted to jobs with considerable responsibility: he was the foreman of the outdoor gardens and, later, foreman in charge of the garden’s extensive propagating houses.

Mr. Pecora first practiced his professional skills as an assistant gardener at Tilford Mansion, the estate of Mrs. Henry Morgan (Isabel) Tilford, in Tuxedo Park, New York. After World War II, and further time at NYBG, Pecora went on, in 1948, to a job as head gardener for the investment banker Arthur Anderson, at White Gates Farm in Bedford Hills (Westchester County), New York. Mr. Anderson was a member of the board of NYBG, and his wife, Alice, was a noted conservationist, president of the Bedford Garden Club, and a top exhibitor at flower shows in the area. Pecora appears to have flourished at the Andersons’ farm, but he was alive to other possibilities. In an undated fragment of a letter of recommendation in support of his former pupil, Mr. Everett of the NYBG wrote that, quite apart from Pecora’s excellent professional credentials, “It is a personal pleasure for me to testify to the fine qualities of Mr. Pecora,” who took charge of Mrs. Mellon’s meticulously laid out and exuberantly planted private garden at Oak Spring, as well as her more far-flung gardening endeavors. The Mellons owned other homes in Washington, D.C., New York City, and Cape Cod. Bunny Mellon also owned a pied-à-terre in Paris, and the Mellons had recently purchased an estate in Antigua, in the British West Indies. This was a dream job: a wildly successful matchup of Pecora, a consummate horticultural craftsman, and Bunny Mellon, a brilliant, self-taught gardener with an unlimited budget.

Oak Spring Garden

At the Mellon estate, comprising the house, garden, and grounds at Oak Spring and, across the road, Rokeby Farm, Pecora stepped into what remains to this day a dynamic, demanding world of high horticultural standards and expectations. He was responsible for the endless job of growing, from seed and cuttings, thousands of annual and perennial flowers for Mrs. Mellon’s walled garden, for taking care of a sweeping collection of pristine greenhouse specimens, and for a large cut-flower garden. He also supervised the gardeners charged with providing fresh fruit and vegetables for the whole estate.

The Oak Spring garden department’s archives represent a staggering record of plants, people, ideas, and hard work. Thick file folders of carbon copies of purchase orders from Rokeby Farms, signed or initialed by Mr. Pecora, organized neatly by supplier and date, capture the seasonal succession of an astonishing variety of plants, palettes, and predilections. Pecora was working for an unthinkably confident individual whose aesthetic sensibilities were very close to the center of her being, and whose every horticultural whim was, so to speak, his command. One purchase order signed by Pecora was for 33,000 Scilla siberica and 17,000 Chionodoxa lutea; Mrs. Mellon planted a hillside of these small, early blooming gems at Oak Spring, and if she wanted to experience the same dazzling shade of blue of at some of her other homes, from Washington to Cape Cod, Mr. Pecora was there to make it happen. 

Archives

Managing the ordering, planting, and care of such substantial purchases required more than horticultural acumen: the job demanded expert clerical skills. A single order to a seed-seller might fill seven type-written pages, practically a catalog in itself, of flowers, vegetables, herbs, and bulbs, as well as garden tools and supplies of every description. The flow of purchases runs on and on through the files. Pecora might place an order for thousands of tulips, daffodils, and other spring-flowering bulbs from the American representatives of great Dutch bulb firms, or for just a packet or three of choice marigold seeds from France. In September, 1962, he signed a purchase order for a “complete garden of English & American boxwood, plus holly & pear trees” which were “to be dug and delivered by us” from the garden of two doctors in Winchester, 20 miles away. Prices were seldom mentioned in all these orders, but, in the case of this boxwood garden, the price was recorded as exactly $3,297.25 — with no explanatory itemization.

Gardeners in rural areas are often served by a stalwart seed store in a market town, but the quantities necessary for the Mellon estate made local purchases challenging: big purveyors up the east coast were better able to supply the volume of seed of parsley, peas, parsnips, peppers, tomatoes, turnips, kohlrabi, celery, broccoli, lettuce, beets, melons, and beans (lima, snap, wax, and bush) requested in Rokeby Farm’s orders. Pecora purchased bamboo plant stakes, for example, by the thousands, and — every year — dozens of balls of green jute, new pruning shears, fresh bolts of burlap, scythes and blades, lawn mowers, and watering cans. Many orders ended with a hand-written note: “kindly ship seed out as soon as possible” or “kindly ship right out.” Timing was everything for gardeners trying to nurse crops to their peak when the Mellons were in residence at Oak Spring, and shipments arrived constantly, all year round. The gardens and greenhouses at Rokeby also supplied the Mellons’ properties elsewhere.

Greenhouses

Bunny Mellon had her favorite plants and palettes, of course, but her interests and requirements were always evolving. As she herself noted, a garden is “hovering always in a state of becoming.” Mrs. Mellon would drop by the greenhouses on the Rokeby farm side of the estate from time to time, and she and Mr. Pecora frequently discussed gardening plans and plant orders in late-night phone calls. “I remember she would call my dad, anytime from 11 pm to 1 in the morning, to go over designs and plants, what was working and not,” says Sally Pecora Dunn, who was a schoolgirl when her family moved to Virginia. “Those conversations meant a lot to my dad,” she says. “Most likely he was writing everything down, in those little notebooks.”

Pecora’s wife, Kit (Katharine Sturges Pecora), who had worked as a volunteer and then as a staff Apprentice Gardener at NYBG, was an unusually knowledgeable and capable secretary. Her initials appear at the bottom of her husband’s correspondence, as was customary.

During the Pecoras’ years in New York, they had developed many professional contacts, and they often also were on friendly terms with their purveyors, who sometimes enclosed a package of seeds from a special source for Pecora to try — knowing well that his boss, Mrs. Mellon, took a keen interest in the beautiful and the rare. Hank Schultz at Scheepers, the respected bulb specialists in New York, enclosed lily seeds from Russia with one order, saying, “I enclose this packet of seed as I know that you are a lily enthusiast. When it blooms I would be pleased to have your comments.” He added, “Hope this finds you and Kit at your best — after all the rain!” Another professional contact and old friend wrote that he would be in Virginia in June and hoped to visit, then signed off: “Hope this finds all the family well, and your golf scores in the 80s.”

The Pecoras had come to Virginia with three young children and soon welcomed a fourth. They were immersed in a lively community of staff members living in houses owned by the Mellons on Rokeby Farm. The employees and their families enjoyed picnics together, celebrating the passing of the seasons. Bunny Mellon covered the cost of tuition for the Pecora children at the Hill School, in Middleburg, where Kit Pecora was a member of the PTA.

Mrs. Pecora was also a leader of the new Girl Scout troop in Middleburg and a member of the Upperville Garden Club — of which Bunny Mellon also was a member. Charles Pecora gave presentations at garden clubs in Fauquier and Loudoun counties. He was a charter member of a local golf club and a member (and one-time president) of the Middleburg Lion’s Club. In 1957, Charlie Pecora participated in a “Womanless Beauty Contest” to benefit the Upperville Community League. At least two of the other contestants were members of the Rokeby Farm garden department staff. The event raised $200, a tidy sum in 1957.

Herbarium

Most garden staff members were recruited from the local community, often with no garden experience whatsoever. George Shaffer, who was hired by Pecora in 1965, had been scheduled to start another job when he was asked to come for an interview at the farm. The interview was on a Monday, and Mr. Shaffer, who was 18, recently married, and living with his in-laws, joined the garden staff the next day. “I knew nothing about gardening, but he took a chance on me,” says Shaffer, who worked for the Mellons for more than 50 years. Staff members learned on the job to nurture plants to perfection and to tend them with the greatest confidence, and doubtless with enviable appreciation for the beauty they had such an important part in creating.

The workday started at 7:30 am in the Rokeby Farm greenhouses, Shaffer says. There were no staff meetings, and little chitchat: the day’s projects were laid out, and the gardeners — there were up to 16 men, plus 8 more in the summertime — got to work. There were seeds to start in small terra-cotta pots (which were ordered by the thousands). Kit Pecora prepared labels in a neat hand. The staff made the garden’s own seed-starting compost. With three greenhouses and extensive production gardens, and the months rolling by, the work was never done. The garden staff was also charged with trimming, trimming, always trimming, the classic herbal topiaries that became, almost literally, one of Mrs. Mellon’s calling cards. As teen-agers, the Pecora children pitched in.

While the crew was at work, Pecora would slip into his office to place orders, make phone calls, and do everything necessary to keep the whole, well-oiled operation in motion. He drove around the estate in a station wagon, often with his dog riding shotgun, checking on the progress of the work, taking notes with a stubby golf pencil in the small spiral notebook he kept in his shirt pocket. 

These were heady times in old Upperville, and Mrs. Mellon’s expectations were sky high. The year after Mr. Pecora came to work for the Mellons, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip came to tea, and a glorious garden full of cheerful flowers welcomed them graciously to Oak Spring. In 1960, Bunny completed the project of adding a sparkling formal greenhouse to her garden, increasing both the beauty and the scope of her private horticultural paradise. In the summer of 1961, when her beloved daughter Eliza Lloyd’s debut was the occasion of a garden party of extraordinary extravagance, the garden staff was involved in the transformation of the property, for one glorious night, into a French country fair. According to newspaper accounts, this was a million-dollar affair.

Bunny Mellon and Jacqueline Kennedy were close friends, and in 1961, President Kennedy asked Bunny to redesign the White House Rose Garden. It was a remarkable opportunity to undertake a dramatic redesign of an important, historic, and very public garden. Mrs. Mellon’s design was a masterstroke, executed with the help of Irvin Williams and his White House garden staff, and relying also on the professional expertise of the Washington, D.C., landscape architect Perry Wheeler, and, of course, Charles Pecora. The garden, a fittingly elegant and sophisticated backdrop for weighty matters of state, opened in April 1962.

The White House

The seasonal flowers in the Rose Garden were replaced several times a year, and Rokeby Farm’s garden department’s orders for thousands of plants for it fill pages and pages in the archives. Index cards make note of planting dates, performance, the duration of bloom time, and the dates plants were removed and replaced with fresh specimens. There were peonies and chrysanthemums, santolina, delphiniums, digitalis, salvias, geraniums, dianthus, roses, martagon lilies. Several orders noted a $20 charge: “tip for driver as per Mrs. Mellon’s instructions.” Pictures from the time show a smiling Mr. Pecora in the Rose Garden.

Oak Spring was, above all, Bunny Mellon’s private garden, but she shared it generously, and her head gardener was always there to prepare the garden to receive visitors: Mrs. Mellon frequently consulted Pecora about the timing for proposed garden tours. In the spring of 1969, a group of about 100 members of The Horticultural Society of New York visited Oak Spring. “This will not be a guided tour. You are free to wander at will,” Charles Pecora said in his welcoming remarks. “Mrs. Mellon, my wife gardeners and I will be around if there are any questions.” To mark the occasion, Paul Mellon composed and read a poem about Bunny and her garden, with some words of praise for her head gardener. Two couplets read: 

When the group departed, each guest received a party favor, a rooted cutting of hardy orange (Poncirus trifoliata), which was, in the words of one guest, “produced with the help of your Mr. Pecora’s magic hands.”

A few weeks later, about 250 members of the Herb Society of America also came for a tour. The guests spent three hours at Oak Spring, exploring the garden and greenhouses, before they were served a lunch of ham sandwiches with watercress, cottage cheese with fresh herbs, and chicken salad. Again, each guest departed with a gift, a rooted cutting of a curry plant propagated in the Rokeby greenhouse from a cutting that originally had come from Vita Sackville-West’s famous garden Sissinghurst, in England.

A folder in the department’s archives, bulging with thank-you notes from Herb Society visitors, includes a description of Mrs. Mellon’s elegant potager in the walled garden as a place “where cabbages are kings and each parsley plant a nosegay.” Several of these notes are addressed directly to Charles and Kit Pecora, who welcomed the guests to the gardens and greenhouses and then joined the group for lunch. “Everyone in the group was exalted by the experience,” one visitor wrote.

Aside from these visits by large groups, dozens of local and regional garden clubs toured the impressive greenhouses and gardens on the Rokeby Farm side over the years; many also visited Mrs. Mellon’s own garden at Oak Spring. In a note to Mrs. Mellon on one occasion, Pecora encouraged her to open her garden for a group: “With all the wonderful improvements you have made and the addition of choice plant material the garden should be perfect at that time of year. I hope you decide to have them come.”

When visitors complimented Pecora on the beauty of the garden, he modestly deflected the praise. In a note to one enthusiastic visitor, he wrote: “you were very kind to say all those nice things about me, but it really was all Mrs. Mellon’s idea and know-how. I simply followed her plan.”

Bunny Mellon was well known for her expert cultivation of miniature herb topiaries, and she described them and was photographed with part of her collection for an article she wrote for Vogue magazine in December, 1965. Readers’ letters poured in to Mrs. Mellon, asking for tips and advice on growing and training these charming specimens, and she turned to Charles and Katharine Pecora for their help. The couple produced a one-page guide, “Home care for herb trees,” to send to everyone who had requested more information. Several requests for topiary tips were addressed directly to Mr. Pecora, whom Mrs. Mellon had described in her Vogue article as “our inspired and scholarly gardener.” They were in fact collaborators: The Washington Post writer and syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop, in 1972, called Pecora “a great horticulturist” and “co-worker of that great garden designer, Bunny Mellon.”

Such a client’s head gardener required deft flexibility. Over the years, Pecora had to be prepared to respond immediately and at all times to Mrs. Mellon’s queries and requests. He corresponded with experts around the world in the search for rare plants for her. She sent the Pecoras to England, Holland, and France to visit important private and public gardens and to meet their renowned horticulturists. In the remarkable international climate of the early 1960s, one of Pecora’s duties was to order flower and vegetable seeds to be placed in bomb shelters on the Mellon estate. He once sent a suitcase full of boxwood plants to France. He wrote up instructions on digging the beds for Mr. Mellon’s garden in Washington. He directed the extensive garden operation at the estate on the island of Antigua. “Mrs. Mellon wants the lawns mowed a little shorter,” he wrote to one of the gardeners there, but there was no rush: it should be done before she next visits, he said. He also asked one of the gardeners in Antigua to send a large flag to Rokeby Farm, “to hang up at the airstrip in honor of anyone arriving from Antigua.”

Pecora’s skills and interests had long extended to the flower-show display bench: he was a trophy winner from back in his New York days. Mrs. Mellon also exhibited at major flower shows, with Mr. Pecora listed as her gardener. Their entries, packed with exceeding care, were driven to New York in Mr. Pecora’s station wagon or flown up in the Mellons’ private plane. They won blue ribbons for primula, cyclamen, and carnations. The ribbons and citations, some of them stamped with gold seals, are part of the collection in Oak Spring’s library today, and they conjure quite a telling image: Mrs. Mellon and her head gardener, enjoying the bustle and uproar of a big-city flower show, competing with meticulously grown and groomed specimens, and taking home blue ribbons to their breathtakingly beautiful and peaceful garden away in the foothills of the Blue Ridge in Virginia. It all surely meant as much to him as it did to her. Bunny Mellon’s garden was an astonishingly successful aesthetic undertaking, and Charles Pecora was her man on the spot.